JoAnn

JoAnn was wild. She was married to Wesley who was much older than she, and they had two young daughters. My aunts Burt and Selma would hold up in her apartment for hours smoking and drinking stong coffee....and talking. When my mother wasn't working at the supermarket wrapping meat, she would join them.
With JoAnn, everything was ok...nothing I did was ever wrong. She seemed to take joy in finding things for me to do that my mother would never allow...like throwing noodles on the wall to see if they were cooked. If they stuck, they were cooked, and you could see over the stove where she had done this many times.
JoAnn gave me a very big part of my life....music. For months I had been after my mother to buy me an accordian. Accordians were big, impressive, made a LOT of noise, and Billy, a crippled boy I played with, had one...with pearl buttons and lots of keys.
Well the accordian thing was just not going to happen. But one afternoon at JoAnn's, she and I talked about me getting into the elementary school band with Miss Tisdale. But I needed something to play.
JoAnn thought a minute, went into her bedroom and came out with a scuffed black case. She told me that when she was a girl in Mississippi she had played in the high school band. She opened the case...and there on purple velvet was a tarnished silver cornet.
It wasn't an accordian, but it drew me. She took it out of the case, put the mouthpiece in...and handed it to me. "I can play it?" She nodded, and just that quickly I put the thing to my lips and blew.
The sound was AMAZING.
Then I looked at the horn more closely. There were dents in the bell, some of the finish was wearing off....but on the bell it was engraved with all sorts of scroll work...and it had a name: "Olds".
An Olds cornet....B flat!
The case and the horn smelled old...old spit, old valve oil...just old.
I produced some terrible noises on the thing, and JoAnn just laughed. And then I went out on her second floor balcony. I gave everyone in that square of project houses a piece of my mind. It was nothing about technique and tone quality or coherent notes ....It was everything about letting loose with stuff....some deep feelings whipping out of that horn. I was wailin'!
I didn't know it then, but it was maybe some of the most pure, honest stuff I ever played. It was jazz!Oh yeah! And the people in those other buildings must have hated me for it....but not JoAnn.
JoAnn gave me that wild look of hers and laughed.... Then she showed me how to give a horn a bath and grease it up with Vasoline and get the valves seated right....stuff like that.
After promising to practice and take care of the thing, she let me walk out of that apartment with one of the few things she had that linked her to what she was before Wesley and the babies...and the housing projects.
So generous and free and.....wild!